The Resilience Maturity Trap – Part 1 | The Business Continuity Planning Program Is Certified, But What About Recovery?

Across industries, organizations have invested heavily in business continuity and resilience programs, many earning ISO 22301 certification or similar credentials. These attestations demonstrate structure, process and alignment to leading standards. Yet when disruption occurs, many of these same organizations struggle to execute effectively, because certification reflects governance, while capability reflects performance.

In this context, the difference between intent and ability determines whether an organization can meet its recovery objectives when real events occur. Today’s operational risk environment demands more than documented compliance documentation. Boards and executives are recognizing that the ability to recover — not simply to report — is what defines true resilience.

From continuity to resilience

Business continuity planning emerged decades ago as a practical discipline focused on minimizing downtime from physical or technology-related disruptions. Over time, the scope expanded to include crisis management, cybersecurity incidents and third-party dependencies. In this evolution, resilience became a broader, more strategic objective. Standards such as ISO 22301 provided a consistent framework to organize these practices, introducing structure and measurable maturity.

But as organizations focused on certification, an unintended consequence emerged. The process became the goal. Maturity became synonymous with success. Many programs excelled in documentation and audit readiness, yet remained untested in their ability to deliver reliable recovery under real conditions.

The resilience maturity trap

This overreliance on maturity models has created a resilience maturity trap. Maturity models are valuable for benchmarking progress and identifying control gaps, but they measure alignment, not performance. A program may achieve a high maturity score while still lacking the ability to restore operations within tolerance. In practice, this creates a false sense of security, providing boards and executives with assurance based solely on documented processes. 

An organization’s actual resilience cannot be inferred from policy strength or audit scores. It must be measured in action.

Defining capability in the modern context

Capability shifts the focus from how well the process is described to how reliably it performs. It moves beyond narrative assurance and emphasizes measurable outcomes.

A capable resilience program:

• Validates recovery objectives through testing, not assumptions.
• Measures actual recovery performance against defined tolerances.
• Integrates business, technology and third-party recovery as a cohesive system.
• Uses real event data to refine performance over time.

This focus on measurable capability aligns with how boards evaluate other enterprise functions: by real-world outcomes.

FTI Technology has developed a flexible and robust framework to help organizations move beyond compliance toward operational resilience that can be demonstrated, measured and sustained.

The framework focuses on validating recovery performance at every level of the organization: business functions, systems, processes and decision-making structures. It establishes a closed loop of continuous improvement, ensuring that resilience evolves alongside the organization’s operations and risk profile.

With this, organizations can transform resilience from a compliance activity into a measurable business capability that can be confidently reported to executive leadership and the board.

The path forward

Compliance, certifications and policies will always be important. They provide structure and consistency. But readiness cannot stop there.

As organizations face increasingly complex disruptions — such as cyber incidents, supply chain failures and geopolitical risks — the ability to recover becomes a core business competency. Certification assures regulators. Capability assures stakeholders.

The next article in this series will explore why traditional maturity models no longer capture the realities of modern resilience and how organizations can reframe their measurement approach to focus on outcomes rather than optics.

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The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of FTI Consulting, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals.